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The verdict is in, folks, and it's the same as it was last year: calling upset gamers 'entitled' is still a lazy substitute for an argument.

I'll be the first to admit that gamers can often go way over the top when they're upset about something.

Anyone who has been in this business for any length of time has been attacked by one horde or another of video game fans who are Seriously Angry with you because you A) liked a game that they hate or B) disliked a game that they love or C) prefer a specific console or PC over other consoles or the PC. The list goes on. Mobs are irrational, and mobs of gamers are no different.

And so we come to a moment of deja vu, in which we see gamers once again labeled with that most perennial of put-downs: Entitled. Anyone who disagrees with the review consensus of DMC, the Devil May Cry reboot from Ninja Theory and Capcom, is just whining for no good reason apparently.

I wasn't aware that there were verdicts when it came to accounting for taste, but I'm likely just behind the times. As a critic of scores, I'm downright hopeless when it comes to verdicts.

From here on out, Hillier's post wanders through a thicket of fallacies.

"What I do not understand is the blithering insanity of Devil May Cry fans in the face of a reboot which does the franchise no harm and by all accounts, quite a lot of good," she writes, apparently unaware that to many fans of the franchise the reboot has done it harm and is not by all accounts "a lot of good."

Simply saying so doesn't make it true. There is no objective barometer of truth when it comes to things like video games.

"The existence of DmC: Devil May Cry doesn’t stop the earlier games existing," Hillier continues. "It doesn’t betray or compromise that existing (incoherent) vision you love so much. If Microsoft threw up in a puddle and sold it under the name “Halo 5″ it wouldn’t stop Halo and its sequels being what they are."

I was never a huge Devil May Cry fan, so this new reboot hasn't really ruffled my feathers despite its obvious shortcomings.

But I can imagine a series of games that I do love very much---the Souls games by From Software, for instance---and I can certainly imagine how I would feel if it Dark Souls 2 changed in ways that hurt the series: betrayed and upset.

This is partly because yes, a new installment in a video game or film franchise really does impact how we feel about the former titles.

This is true in film as well.

For instance, I have never been able to enjoy Star Wars as much as I used to not just because of George Lucas's shameless edits of the old films, but because of how bad the prequel films were. The awfulness of the second trilogy hurt my overall appreciation of the Star Wars universe.

If Microsoft "threw up in a puddle" and sold it as Halo 5 then yes, that would indelibly harm the Halo brand, and cast a long, bleak shadow back on the earlier games.

This is partly because of association and partly because canon entries in a series really do impact earlier installments. A story is not just beginning, middle, and end. It's our appreciation of all these components together that counts.

In Jurassic Park 2 (the book) a main character that died in the first book turned out to be only "mostly dead" in the second. That hurt the original a great deal.

The last two Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin have been a huge let down for many fans of the series, and this has cast a pall over the earlier books, regardless of how much better they were.

And yes, of course some fans will go too far in their tactics. You know what they say about bad apples. Petitioning the White House is silly, for instance, but only a tiny handful of Devil May Cry fans have actually done that.

In the internet age, we're privy to all the most ludicrous actions of the vocal minority in every realm of life, but that doesn't mean that anyone upset with this game is just an "entitled" crybaby giving gamers a bad name.

Just because someone doesn't agree with VG24/7's "verdict" doesn't mean...well it doesn't mean anything actually (and no, a subset of reviews is not scientific proof of quality anymore than you can gauge a game's value after it's been bombed by Metacritic users. These are signposts that can help you in your journey, but not proof of anything at all.)

"And yet despite the complete absence of logic behind this ill-will," Hillier continues, "it runs so strongly that some of you have gone so far as to send death threats to Ninja Theory staff, to accuse VG247 and its peers of corruption, a charge which stinks of conspiracy-theory paranoia, and to write thousands of words of rabid vitriol against Dante’s hair colour rather than react like a normal human being to a game that has absolutely no impact on your life and happiness in any meaningful way."

She follows this up with a remarkable saving throw against irony by telling gamers to "grow the #*&$ up" proving once and for all that things that have "absolutely no impact on your life and happiness in any meaningful way" can inspire even the best of us to bouts of rhetorical excess.

Here's my two cents: I'm about fifty-fifty on DmC so far. There's good, bad, and ugly in this game, and I can both enjoy it for what it is and lament it for what it isn't.

But it's good to criticize and to complain when it comes to video games, television, film, and any other thing which we consume for personal enjoyment. That's how you get your point out there. It's not good to do it by issuing death threats, of course, or by attacking the messenger---a much more common fallacy gamers tend to resort to. And of course some people will complain about everything and rarely offer up solutions. Misery loves company, or something like that.

My advice? Make your arguments solid. Make them more solid than your opponents' arguments. Your arguments should be rocks to their scissors. Utilize data whenever possible, and avoid logical fallacies at all costs.

But don't ever think that you can't voice your opinion just because of some artificial "verdict." Just try to be less of a jerk than the new Dante when you do it.

I'll probably be far more mild in my critique of DmC than hardcore fans, but that's because my opinion is going to be inherently different from yours---my taste and my experience and what I want in a game are all unique to me as a gamer and as a human being. Indeed, I imagine many reviewers really did legitimately enjoy DmC.

There is no objective standard here, and there never will be. We are designed to disagree---and that's a good thing.